Motorworld Page 12

  The car sales figures here make for some pretty amazing reading, by which I mean Mercedes outsells Ford. Sure, Renault is at number one in the charts but in 1993, Bugatti outsold Rover. Yes, in Monaco, the £300,000, 200-mph EB110 was more popular than the eminently sensible Metro.

  And that was its downfall. You see, in Monaco, it is not necessary to drive the most expensive car on the market, but to turn up for dinner at the Hôtel de Paris and find someone else is already there with an identical car is a social gaffe second only to vomiting on Princess Caroline.

  One car salesman told me that the hardest part of his job was knowing which restaurants and which clubs are favoured by which people.

  ‘I simply couldn’t sell someone a red Porsche Turbo if I knew someone else who goes to the same parties already had one. I would suggest he bought a different model, or had a different spoiler fitted, or went for a different colour,’ said our man.

  This, I think I’m right in saying, does not happen in Rotherham, but that’s because to the good people of South Yorkshire, a car is just that. In Monaco, it is the last item of clothing you put on before you go out. Out there, a garage is simply a large wardrobe.

  The trouble with Bugatti is that, for a time, it was the car to have, but when there were more than a dozen fighting for attention in the main square the impact was lost. You’d have been better off with a TVR Griffith.

  I know this because I had one and I was the coolest dude in town. You wanna know what Steph’s like in bed? You talk to me. Me and Albert? I call him Al — and I’m the one who laughs when he walks into a nightclub and says, ‘Okay girls. Stop your grinning and drop your linen.’ He does this a lot, apparently.

  My Griffith was by no means the most expensive car in Monaco and, having been driven there from England, it certainly wasn’t the cleanest, but no one else had one and that is what counted.

  Outside every large hotel, club or restaurant, uniformed doormen would indulge in prolonged bouts of fist fighting to decide who’d get the privilege of parking it. In every traffic jam, girls with impossible hair and comic-book legs would lean in and purr. And once, after I’d given it a full-bore take-off up the hill in first gear, I was stopped by an Italian millionaire in a Ferrari F40 and asked if I’d like to swap.

  This really does happen out there. I know of one chap who offered to buy Michael Shoemaker’s Bugatti after the two met in a gym, but pulled out when the world champion said it was beneath his dignity to actually deliver the car.

  Then there was the Australian who ran into a Lamborghini salesman at the Beach Club and asked simply, ‘Are they any good?’ Once he’d been assured, by this most unbiased of sources, that they were, he ordered a £165,000 Diablo.

  Another guy saw a Lancia Delta Integrale cruise by while having lunch at the Hôtel de Paris and told his sidekick to find the owner and buy it.

  To be a car salesman out there, you need to move and shake at the right places. You need the right clothes, the right hair, the right wristwatch and an ability to speak at least five languages. Very few people ever walk into a car showroom when they need a car; they meet you at a party and the deal is done.

  But you have to be at the party in the first place.

  While I was there, Rinspeed, the Swiss car company, launched its new supercharged Roadster by parking one outside Jimmyz, the nightclub. People saw it, met the salesman inside and a sale followed.

  Well that was the theory, but unfortunately, I pissed on their bonfire by turning up in the Griffith. The Rinspeed may have raised an eyebrow or two but that Griffith lowered everyone’s underwear. The aquamarine paint job helped, but the noise usually clinched it so I had to spend all night turning down ever-more ludicrous and tempting cash offers.

  It’s not mine, I’d wail. We don’t care whose it is, we want it and here’s a fistful of money, came the reply.

  Yes, people do go out at night with 50 grand in their pocket — especially if it’s their round. There’s one woman who leaves the casino every night of the week with £3-million-worth of jewellery about her person. But even at 4.00 a.m. she knows she is in no danger because in Monaco there is no crime.

  By which I mean there is no petty pilfering. Largely this is because people with hundreds of millions of pounds in the bank are not big on mugging or house-breaking. Why go to all the trouble of nicking a car when you can just buy one?

  But what about the thousands of visitors who come to Monaco every year? Surely, a few of these ne’er-do-wells in their coaches and their shellsuits are not averse to a bit of robbery?

  Perhaps, but Monaco has them covered by 160 security cameras that sweep the streets and a further 1000 or so in garages, hotel lobbies and even the lift in our car park.

  That, all on its own, would keep everyone in check, but to make absolutely sure, there is one policeman for every 40 residents in Monaco.

  Now these guys learned everything they know from Russia’s special forces. There are rules in Monaco and if you don’t like them, the policemenists will escort you back to France where you can convalesce.

  If you are smartly dressed and driving a Ferrari you have nothing to fear, even if you’ve just broken the economy of a Third World country. It doesn’t matter if, after one phone call, you’ve destroyed a factory in Tennessee and put 500 people on the dole, you are the sort of person they want in the sunshine state.

  But if you are wearing jeans and driving a van, you will be stopped at every road junction. Your papers will be checked over and over again. They will harass you and hassle you, only pausing to salute Gordon Gekko as he slides by in a Roller.

  Before we could film anything, we needed heavy-duty government permission and there was no question of trying to get by on a wing and a prayer. We’d set up our camera and one of theirs would see, so that within minutes, Clouseau would be on the scene, wanting to know our mothers’ maiden names and whether our next-door neighbours kept budgerigars.

  Every night outside our hotel two policemen would blow their whistles interminably, pulling over anyone whose face didn’t quite fit. In Monaco, it is against the law to look odd.

  Unless you have an electric car. There is no greater demonstration of this country’s immense wealth than the government’s current obsession with battery-powered vehicles.

  They offer huge discounts to anyone who buys such a car, and are about to provide free charging points around the city, but the total number sold to private individuals so far is… nought. In Monaco, people are not interested in saving money.

  I spent a few days hanging around with one 28-year-old guy who vehemently denied that he was a playboy, but there was some evidence to suggest he was not being absolutely honest.

  First, there was his boat which, at the time, was away in America being equipped with new, more powerful engines. Then there were his cars. He said he didn’t have so many these days, only ten, but my, what a collection. There was the Bugatti, of course, the Ferrari, of course, the Porsche 911, of course, the army Jeep and the Lamborghini LM002, which he used as a day-to-day runabout. And why not? I mean, it’s ideal in the crowded streets and so easy to park.

  He also had a 40-tonne truck which he bought to take his Bugatti to Finland where he set a world record for driving on ice — at 180 mph.

  Quite a life, I’m sure you’ll agree. But we haven’t got to the subject of girls yet. He had bedded every single one of the best-looking women in southern France, and maybe the whole of Europe, now I come to think of it, but said that the best was a Texan, who did amazing things with dogs and video cameras apparently.

  However, when I was there he was about to take up motor racing again so he was giving women a rest. ‘Just for today’, you understand. Then he wandered off with someone who had a blonde head and some legs, but that was about it.

  He was one of the lucky ones though. Because everyone there is so rich, and so handsome, and so chiselled, it is quite normal to have 50 million in the bank, no spots and a Mercedes but to end up on your o
wn every night.

  Sit in the Café de Paris and just watch. You will see the same cars going round and round and round for hours, their desperate Latino drivers eyeing up everything with a pulse. It’s sad, and horrid.

  And it gets worse when the Grand Prix rolls into town. The parties get phonier, the rich get richer and the police plumb new depths on the bolsh-o-meter. And on top of all that, the locals pack up and leave.

  Half of me says they do the right thing but as I sat in the Sporting Club, watching Belinda Carlisle strut her ample stuff at the Marlboro party, I began to wonder. I had Chris Rea to my left and Jean Alesi to my right as the roof slid back to reveal a monster fireworks display.

  The champagne was Bollinger, the caviar was Russian and the waiters made George Hamilton look ugly. This was weapons-grade conspicuous consumption.

  But there was more to come. I ended up on a massive boat in the harbour, cummerbund akimbo, talking to a girl who appeared to be wearing nothing at all. It was warm, the stars were out, the vodka was tinged with a hint of lemongrass and all around, truly beautiful people were having a truly beautiful time.

  You may think that making Motorworld was one long orgy of fast cars, loose women, supersonic boats and high living. But you’d be forgetting the expense account, candle-lit dinners, the sun-kissed beaches and the five-star hotels.

  Monaco has been described as the world’s first wildlife reserve for humans but if that’s the case, let me tell you that being an exhibit there is industrial-strength fun.

  India

  This chapter is dedicated to Uday Rao Kavi. A fine man.

  Calcutta is a remarkable city, known throughout the subcontinent as a city of thinkers, a place where they prefer to discuss cricket than play it. If you can ignore the soot-blackened brickwork and the completely opaque air, you will marvel at the buildings, built with the vast money brought to Calcutta by the British East India Company.

  You will seek out the Fairlawn Hotel where you will tuck into winter-warming soup, roast beef and spotted dick. Outside, you will see people cooking their supper on open fires.

  Me, I was more taken with a bright-yellow Lotus Esprit Turbo which had just cruised by.

  Calcutta is where they make the Hindustan Ambassador — better known as the 1950s Morris Oxford — and the luxurious Hindustan Contessa, an old Vauxhall. Every single car on the streets is a Hindustan of indeterminate age and condition. Some have brakes. Some have steering. Some have suspension. Some have none of these things and are therefore a bit worrying.

  But there, in the middle of it all, was the yellow Lotus. What kind of moron would drive a car like that in a country where driving is not a chore or an art form? In India, driving is something you learn to do badly.

  And that leads me neatly on to the Indian driving test.

  The examiner finds a quiet piece of road and asks you to demonstrate that you can make the car move and stop. Then he gives you permission to take part in what is by far the most dangerous game on earth: driving on the subcontinent.

  Visitors may laugh but what passes as mayhem is, in fact, carnage. Even though there are only 29 million vehicles in India — just four million more than we have in Britain — they manage to kill 164 people every day. By way of comparison, we kill just thirteen.

  This means that, every twelve months, 60,000 people die on the Indian roads and if you ask about serious injuries, officialdom just shrugs, a despairing look on its face.

  Informed sources reckon that upwards of a quarter of a million people are hospitalised and broken by car crashes every year in India. That’s the population of a big British town.

  And the statistics keep on coming. In Bombay, a city which has more dollar-millionaires than Los Angeles or New York, every single family has been affected in some way by a car crash. Nationwide, one car in five will, at some stage in its life, be involved in a fatal accident.

  We may scoff at the Indian’s inability to get from A to B without killing someone but, really, it isn’t funny.

  And despite what you might think, the driving test is not really to blame because most people don’t bother taking it.

  What you do if you want a permit is send a few rupees to a driving agency in another state, simply asking for one. And by return of post, you’ll get it.

  One girl that we spoke to decided to actually take the test and then found herself sharing her exam with six other hopefuls. Everyone else, including the examiner, piled into one car and she was asked to drive her little hatchback on her own. After a couple of hundred yards, the two-car convoy stopped and everyone passed, even though five of them had only been passengers and she’d been on her own.

  With this sort of background, you can be assured that almost no one on the street has any form of training. But more worrying still, they don’t follow any rules.

  The trouble is that if you are stopped by a policeman, which almost never happens, you only need furnish his outstretched paw with the equivalent of £2 and nothing more will be said. The motoring courts in India’s cities are as packed as the Yukon.

  Take insurance, for example. To drive without it in Europe is a serious offence which will result in a possible jail term. Throughout the Continent, high streets are full of insurance brokers and every newspaper carries advertisements for bargains galore.

  But none is quite so cheap as the system in India. You just don’t buy it.

  But even a complete lack of discipline or training doesn’t account for what is a massacre. I mean, there are other countries in the world with a similar background of corruption and bureaucratic inefficiency, and they don’t get through 164 people every day.

  What sets India apart is religion. Being mindful of Salman Rushdie’s fate, and not wanting to criticise Hinduism, I feel duty-bound to report that it doesn’t fit very well with motoring. These are pieces from two different jigsaws.

  It seems that Hindus have a fatalistic approach to life, believing that everything has been organised in advance and that there is absolutely nothing they can do to shape their own destiny. Que serà serà and fair enough.

  We spoke to one ordinary businessman who was by no means a zealot and he explained, calmly, that he would trust his God more than mechanical safety. Indeed, he told of a time when his brakes had failed just a few miles into a cross-country journey, adding, ‘I said a prayer and carried on; 250 km without brakes, but it was OK because it was not my day to die.’

  But what about the Indian habit of pulling out to overtake on a blind bend or just before the brow of a hill, something that they all do? ‘Well,’ said our man, ‘if it’s your day to die, boom, you go.’ And what about the person you hit? ‘Well it was obviously his day to go too.’

  Coupled to this fatalistic approach is a belief in reincarnation which removes all fear of death. Why worry about it, when you know you’ll be back as a bumblebee or a sheep some time later? That’s not intended as criticism — it’s a fact.

  But, unfortunately, the belief that you don’t control the car and that if you die, it’s no big deal, does create problems. About 164 problems every day actually.

  I drove from Bombay to Pune and simply could not believe what my eyes were seeing.

  The roadside was littered with broken and smashed trucks, and I’m not using hyperbole here. When I say littered, I mean, littered. Every few hundred yards, there’d be another gaily painted circa-1950s lorry upside down in the ditch.

  Every tree along the entire route showed signs of battle damage, of having been in a collision with some kind of motor vehicle.

  In one case, the lorry in question was still wrapped round the trunk. The whole passenger side of the cab was gone but mercifully no one had been sitting there at the moment of impact. I know this because the driver told me. He’d been sitting by the wreckage for four days, waiting for help.

  ‘Have you got any food?’ I asked. ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘I brought plenty for when I crashed.’ ‘When’, you’ll note. Not ‘if’.

 
Crashing on this main highway is a certainty, for many reasons.

  First, huge potholes big enough to swallow a train, never mind my Mahindra Jeep, are thoughtfully marked out by a ring of boulders of exactly the right size to either break your steering or launch you into the pit.

  They use boulders in India to mark out all the hazards. When your truck breaks down in the middle of the road, which it will, the first thing you do is surround it with boulders. The boulder is India’s warning triangle though, frankly, it doesn’t work.

  You come round a corner, see the stranded lorry and you are usually still working out which side to pass when you hit the huge stone. Things get even worse at night because no self-respecting Indian ever uses his lights. Who needs them when you have divine guidance.

  You drive along blind and if, by some miracle, you see the lorry-sized obstacle, you daren’t ease on to the wrong side of the road to pass because there’s no way of knowing if anything’s there. You’ll still be braking hard, and deciding what to do, when the boulder breaks your steering joints.

  There are cows, too. Elsewhere in the democratic world, farmyard animals graze in fields, prevented from getting on to the roads with fences which are often electrified. But not in India. Cows there have obviously developed a fondness for small pieces of gravel because round every bend, your way will be blocked with a quarter-ton of meat, muscle and horn. One day, cows will learn to surround themselves with boulders, but it hasn’t happened yet.

  Children are equally daft. There are no pelican crossings with handy beepers for the deaf, no purpose-built speed bumps near the school. And no Green Cross Code either. When a child wants to get from one side of the road to the other, he simply does it, without warning.

  There are no speed limits in India but I was so wary of all the various hazards that I tended to drive around at a pace which was measurable in yards per year. You would have needed a theodolite and three satellites to ascertain that I was making any progress at all sometimes.